Who Will Fill McCain “Shoe In The Revolving Door” at the Military Industrial Complex?

“BLOOMBERG GOVERNMENT ”
“Through successive administrations, McCain railed against the persistent revolving-door between the Pentagon and the defense industry, and the conflicts those ties pose.
His commitment to reining in Pentagon contracting abuses was hardened during the Boeing tanker scandal.”
“No one in the modern era has had more influence on how the Defense Department purchases weapons — or how the agency keeps watch over those multibillion-dollar programs — than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died Aug. 25 after a battle with brain cancer.
McCain was the main force behind several of the biggest procurement-focused Pentagon reorganizations since the sweeping changes of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986.
He was a passionate voice against fraud, waste and abuse at the DOD. He regularly took government and contractor witnesses to task for cost-overruns and other management missteps that hurt taxpayers.
“He will be remembered as one of the very few in Congress who was unrelenting in his drive to hold both industry and the executive branch equally accountable to deliver on time, on cost,” Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told Bloomberg Government in a written statement.
“There have been many who have been hard on industry or hard on the administration, especially if they come from the other political party,” said Spoehr. “Senator McCain was an ‘equal-opportunity’ critic of both.”
Bloomberg Government communicated with Spoehr, and the others, in May.
‘A DEEP CONCERN’
McCain’s tenure shaping defense acquisition policy took place in three distinct phases, analysts say: his leadership in the Boeing tanker scandal, which first surfaced in 2003; his role in the formulation and passage of the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009; and most recently, his chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which began in 2015.
McCain’s interest in DOD acquisition dates to at least 1987, when he was tapped for a seat on the Armed Services Committee as a rookie senator. McCain descended from a line of Navy admirals, and served as a naval aviator before being captured and held as a prisoner of war during Vietnam.
In December of 2003, after Darleen Druyun left for a job with Boeing, DOD officials announced they were investigating the former principal undersecretary of the Air Force for acquisition for corruption.
That led to Druyun’s guilty plea for inflating the price of a contract for a new fleet of mid-air refueling tankers, while secretly negotiating for her Boeing job. Soon after, McCain began to dig deeper.
McCain’s efforts helped lead to Boeing’s chief financial officer, Michael Sears, getting fired and sentenced to four months in jail. They also spurred the cancellation of the Air Force contract — which saved the government $6 billion, he said at the time.
“He had a deep concern about wrongdoing” in DOD’s procurement system, as reflected in the Druyun case, Peter Levine, a former long-time SASC staffer, told Bloomberg Government. The tanker scandal “was the first instance that really got him energized.”
McCain’s leadership skills, strong sense of outrage, and unflagging energy drew others to his cause, said Levine, currently a senior research fellow with the Institute for Defense Analyses. “People paid attention to him,” he said. “He often brought the rest of the committee along with him.”
BIPARTISAN SUPPORT
Streamlining DOD’s massive acquisition process became a mission of McCain’s soon after he joined the committee, former aides said.
This initially culminated with the unanimous passage of the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009. By then, McCain had become ranking Republican member of the SASC.
Among other things, the bill, co-sponsored by then-Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), created the Cost Evaluation and Program Assessment office, which provides the secretary of defense with independent cost analyses of new programs.
At the bill-signing ceremony, President Barack Obama, who beat McCain in the 2008 presidential race, praised his formal rival for persistent attempts to ensure cost-accountability at the Pentagon.
In fact, McCain raised the issue of defense procurement overhaul during the first meeting between the two after the election, Obama said. “We pledged to work together to get it done,” he said.
In part through the weapons reform act, McCain “solidified his expertise regarding Pentagon purchasing and defense contractors,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst and fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, told Bloomberg Government in a written statement.
“It’s indisputable that he was a leader for the committee, his party, and the U.S. Senate writ large on all of these policy questions,” said Eaglen.
‘ENOUGH SAID, GENERAL. OKAY?’
McCain rarely hesitated to tear into Pentagon officials whose projects progressed slower than expected, or cost more than estimated, or suffered mishandled execution.
Such projects included Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; Lockheed’s F-22 “Raptor” jet fighter; the $6.5 billion Warfighter Information Network built for the Army by General Dynamics Corp.; and the Littoral Combat Ship, two versions of which are being built by Lockheed and Austal Ltd.
The General Dynamics program amounts to “a network that doesn’t work,” McCain said at a December 2017 hearing in which he also slammed the F-35 as a trillion-dollar program “that continues to operate in dysfunction.”
At times, McCain’s temper got the better of him, as evidenced by testy questioning at committee hearings. In March 2016, about a year after he became Armed Services chairman, one such exchange took place when McCain questioned Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh over the agency’s plans to replace the A-10 jet, which had been making bombing runs over Iraq and Syria.
McCain became increasingly irritated as he and Welsh sparred.
“But you haven’t got a replacement for it, General,” McCain said. “You sit here and say that you do. This absolutely flies in the face of facts. So — enough said, general. Okay?”
“Okay, chairman,” said Welsh, softly.
SPEEDING ACQUISITIONS
As he took the reins of the Armed Services panel in January of 2015, McCain’s pique at both industry and government for shepherding overly costly defense programs had intensified.
He was ready to push for his most significant procurement revamping yet.
By the end of that year, McCain had written a provision into the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (P.L. 114–328) to “devolve” responsibility for DOD acquisition programs to individual service chiefs. This decentralization made the service chiefs “milestone decision authorities” — officials designated responsible for major defense acquisition programs — instead of DOD’s centralized Office of Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L).
McCain continued his push to streamline the system in the 2017 defense authorization bill, when he fought for AT&L to be split into two new Defense Department units — acquisition and sustainment (A&S), and research and engineering (R&E) — each with its own undersecretary.
THE REVOLVING DOOR
In his last few years, McCain used his bully pulpit to go after high-level DOD nominees by asking them to explain how they would make sure their industry backgrounds wouldn’t affect their ability to work exclusively in the interests of taxpayers.
More than 80 percent of top DOD officials under President Donald Trump have defense contractor work experience, a Bloomberg Government report recently found — much higher than the percentage of those appointed to the same positions by Obama.
During several confirmation hearings from June 2017 through the end of that year, McCain, at times joined by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), targeted Trump nominees, including those for deputy secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan, and DOD undersecretary for policy, John Rood.
“You should not be making decisions that are related to your previous employment, or would affect the fortunes of one of them,” he told Rood.
Groups like the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington nonprofit, have praised McCain for raising awareness about the revolving door and the effects it can have on the system.
“A lot of his work has come to assessing whether the weapons systems we buy are affordable or effective. He’s recognized that part of the problem with our unaffordable systems is the influence of the revolving door,” Mandy Smithberger, director of POGO’s Straus Military Reform Project, told Bloomberg Government in a written statement.
MCCAIN’S LEGACY
Armed Services Committee staffers remember McCain with great respect. “From the beginning of his career, he’s been dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud and abuse, and bolstering integrity in Congress and at the Defense Department,” Evelyn Farkas, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Bloomberg Government.
McCain will be difficult if not impossible to replace as Congress’s leading Pentagon overseer and reformer, analysts say. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, does bring a zeal to change the system, they say. But some question Thornberry’s willingness to engage in McCain-level oversight, especially of industry.
“No one today has the standing, understanding, and frankly the passion to explore defense acquisition issues that Senator McCain has,” said Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation. “Congressman Mac Thornberry comes the closest. It is not clear who, if anyone, can fill this void.”
